Last night’s walk contained quite a lot of drama – a low-key Chekhovian, rather than Wagnerian, drama, but drama all the same.
It was complicated from the start by my extravagant limp. I acquired a hip injury playing cricket, and it seems that there is no way to stifle a limp that begins at the hip. On the contrary, I looked like someone deliberately exaggerating a limp, or playing a one-legged man on the stage. And then there was a philosophical issue. I was taking my dog on a walk, to buy dog food, for the same dog. And I couldn’t decide if this involved a futile circularity, like someone tickling themselves just for the pleasure of scratching, or the sign that reads ‘Do Not Throw Stones At This Sign’, or if it was in fact a fantastically efficient way to organise things. I think the problem was that the vague thematic symmetry, or echoing, made me strive to find a structural unity that wasn’t really there. Anyway, I bought the dog food, and, almost accidentally, some tiramisu (special offer at Waitrose). I didn’t want to splash out 5p on a bag, so I put the dogfood in my pocket, and carried the tiramisu almost ceremonially before me, like Balthazar with his myrrh (or whatever his gift was). Just around the corner from our flat, I limped towards a group of giggling young women in their finery, waiting for a cab, their hair huge and glittery in the streetlight. At that moment – and one might think that he had carefully calculated and schemed to maximise my embarrassment – Monty decided it was time to unload. The girls fell reverently silent, while Monty was about his business. Now I had the problem of bagging it up, while holding the tiramisu in one hand and Monty in the other, and still greatly discommoded by my shattered hip. I tried bending and scooping in one movement, single handed, but nearly toppled. Should I pass the tiramisu to one of the young women? Or perhaps they could hold Monty? There was a wall next to the girls. I decided to put the tiramisu on it. ‘Tiramisu,’ one said, and they all burst into good natured laughter. I suppose, with my limp, and scruffy little dog, I looked like a sad and lonely bachelor, about to enjoy his one treat – his Saturday night tiramisu. ‘Reduced,’ I muttered. And then added, ‘for my daughter.’ The young women were quite nice, really, and I felt more pitied than mocked, which I don’t mind. So the next thing was two men walking towards me, hand in hand. One was a near-giant – a huge white guy at least 6 foot 6. His friend was a very small, very round man, from South Asia. He was wearing a pair of shorty shorts, although he looked quite middle aged. It was a delightful and charming sight – I mean the unselfconscious way they were holding hands. I began to form a smile, but then I became worried that smiling at two men just because they’re holding hands might seem patronising. So I carefully removed the smile. But then I feared that perhaps, in my efforts not to smile, I was looking stern and disapproving, like some American Nazi at a Pride march. This would have turned the whole walk into a disaster, but then the little round man said, ‘Nice doggy,’ and so I could have one of those friendly ten second interactions with strangers which are one of the joys of dog ownership.So it all ended a bit better than the Chekhov, and a lot better than the Wagner. Marriage of Figaro, really.

We all have little things that we do. Signifiers of ‘us’. One of my things used to be a sort of dance, both sprightly and courtly – think the second season of Blackadder – which I used to perform when Rosie was doing her violin practise. I did this dance largely – but not solely – to annoy her. As is the way of these things, the more I did it, the more enraged she’d become. My specialty was to perform it behind her back, so that she wouldn’t notice it to begin with and only the sound of the dance steps would alert her to my presence. Or I’d do it at such an angle that she’d catch sight of me reflected in a window. Her tearful entreaties for me to stop would be met by my sad insistence that I couldn’t stop – that the dance was engendered within me by her music, and I couldn’t resist. Anyway, three or four years ago she gave up the violin. And then, the other week, she decided that she’d like to take it up again. I’d forgotten about the dance, and so her practise was unaccompanied by my cavorting. Then, just now, it all came back to me. She was playing that Vivaldi thing in G everyone does. I sneaked up behind her, ready to commence. I flexed and tensed, ready to spring. And then I found that I no longer had the energy to do it. My legs were weak. Both muscle memory and muscle had gone. The sort of core strength and stability you need to prance had left me. Rosie played on, knowing nothing of the tragedy enacted behind her. I shuffled away, my shoulders slumped in defeat. Farewell my pavanes and galliards; adieu noble sarabande; goodbye sweet gavotte.

Even great writers are capable of producing dross, but I think Serenade is the worst book I’ve read by an otherwise fine writer (James M Cain). It’s an implausible, silly, poorly constructed novel – a highly misconceived mash-up of opera and noir.
However, it has one great scene, in which the hero, an opera singer on the slide, catches and cooks an iguana in the Mexican desert. Looking at the trussed beast, he somehow knows what to do – some primal instinct or deep genetic knowledge kicks in. He prepares two pans of boiling water, then hurls the living lizard into one, and straight away extracts it, and plunges it into the second (the process causing the iguana to evacuate its gut, thereby ‘cleaning’ it. The iguana tastes wonderful (yes, like chicken).
The whole episode gives him the will to go back and try to get his career back – which he does when the lead drops out at the Hollywood bowl at the last moment, and a call goes out ‘Is there a tenor in the house’.
Anyway, I had a similar experience this morning. I looked in the fridge and saw some cream, that had recently turned, some mixed berries, once frozen, now quietly forgotten and fermenting, some milk (well gone), and some cream cheese, with a pretty pattern of green and black mould.
Seeing all these things, the idea formed in me, somehow bypassing the conscious or rational part of my brain.
My hands began to move.
And then, twenty five minutes later, 12 mixed berry scones came out of the oven.
Only 3 remain.

That was rather unsettling. Went for a haircut to the cheap place down the road. The only barber was a woman – an extraordinarily pretty Moroccan (as it turned out).
I’ve not had my hair cut by a woman in at least a decade. The last time it was a careworn Albanian, down in West Hampstead’s Little Illyria (there really is such a place – our local Albania Town).
“All Albanian men is shits,” she hissed in my ear, at one point. Anyway, I was a little thrown by the beauty of my barber (a Berber barber? Possibly…). I’d forgotten what an intimate act it all is, the caressing and stroking of the head…
And then I remembered that just the other day a Facebook friend (which one …?) had told me that her hairdressing husband had to put up with people who would ‘fiddle under the smock’, and so I became worried that she might suspect me of something similar, as I supposed that her beauty might well attract the wrong sort of customer. So I kept my hands rigidly on the chair arms (though still beneath the smock). And then I felt a twitch of hey-fever. I feared a messy sneeze. I had no hanky. Could I ask her for a tissue? It would be fine if I actually sneezed. But what if the urge passed? And I drew the tissue beneath the smock, to put it in my pocket … Anyway, it made for a very stressful twenty minutes. Half way through a silver fox character came in, bearing a bunch of flowers. Another barber had appeared, ready to work, but the silver fox waved him away, and asked my Berber barber how long she’d be. I think the flowers were for her. ‘Soon,’ she said, and I felt her hurry, rather, over my sideburns.When I stood up after the haircut, the smock having been whipped away, I saw that the heat and the stress had resulted in the front of my shirt being sodden. ‘It’s, er, sweat,’ I said, though it would have been better to remain silent. I gave her a very generous tip.
Which again now seems like a mistake.

I had a bright idea this morning. Rather than add another (albeit biodegradable) plastic bag to the ecosphere, I thought I’d deal with Monty’s morning deposit by scooping it up in a discarded (non-recyclable) coffee cup. I hadn’t formally worked out what my next step would be – I was torn between emptying it in the drain, or just putting the whole lot in the bin. While I was mulling my next step, my eye was caught by a book in the charity shop window – ‘Rosemary Shrager’s Yorkshire Breakfasts’. The author, a middle-aged woman, loomed hugely over a dry-stone wall, before which were arrayed various food items – none of which seemed particularly Yorkshirish. A loaf of white bread. Some eggs. A tomato. Of course the true Yorkshire breakfast would be rice crispies. Or Diamond White. Anyway, the hideous cover caught me for a few moments. Long enough, in fact, for an acquaintance I’d not seen for several years to come bustling along the street. She was a school gate mother, whose name I’ve never known, as I only ever learn names on a need to know basis, and we didn’t have kids in the same class, so our interactions were always brief and perfunctory, even though she was (and still is, sort of, it turned out) quite attractive. The trouble was that she’d come along as I was gazing in at the charity shop window (never a good look), while holding a coffee cup containing some dogshit. What to do? The key, I thought, was to keep the cup above her eyeline. So, as she approached, I raised it. I think it was this – it must have looked like a toast or salute – that alerted her to my presence – I don’t think she’d clocked me before. Now she gazed at me – the unshaven man in front of the charity shop, holding up a cup of … something. She stared into my face, trying, obviously, to place me. But nothing came up. Her focus shifted into the distance, and she continued briskly on her way. I looked back at Rosemary Shrager’s doughy face, expecting to see mockery or condescension there, but she appeared quite sympathetic. I dumped the cup of shame in the bin, taking solace from the fact I’d saved an albatross or octopus from some plasticky entrapment in the wild Sargasso sea, or the reefs of Bora Bora, or wherever these things end up.

Snacking last night with the children on some so-so Tyrrell’s salt and vinegar ‘furrowed’ crisps, I indulged myself in a little whimsical cadenza on the fact that the crinkle-cut crisp was one of the many great things Yorkshire has given the world. The crinkle-cut crisp revolutionised the world of savoury snacks, I explained, when it was invented in the dawn of the junk-food era. I can’t quite remember what I said about it, but I linked the crinkle-cut crisp in with the great events of the 20th century, irritating the children, but amusing myself.Anyway, today I decided to look up the ‘real’ history of the crinkle-cut crisp. I remembered that Seabrook’s – a Bradford-based crisp manufacture – had crinkle cut crisps back in the 70s, when they were still a novelty – they were the only crisps available in our school tuck shop. The tuck shop was ruled over by a terrifying teacher called Mr Carrol, who other, milder, teachers would call on when any brutalisation needed to be done. He had huge, blunt fingers, and you could exact a petty revenge on him by putting your 5p flat on the tuck shop counter, and watch him try to pick it up, his frustration growing like a boiling caldera waiting to blow.
The Seabrook crisp had a light, melting texture, though I’m not sure what role the crinkling played in that. It’s well established crinkle-cut chip absorbs more fat, as the chip surface area to volume ratio is increased, just as the villi and microvilli in the gut increase the surface area, and facilitate nutrient absorption. But surely a crinkle-cut crisp is different, in that the crisp merely undulates, so to speak, and retains a uniform thickness – like a concertinaed piece of paper. A little further research on the topic turned up the surprising fact that Seabrook’s had, in fact, invented the crinkle-cut crisp, back in the 1950s. Or at least introduced it to this country. I’ve no idea where from. Perhaps Bulgaria, which was a powerhouse of crisp innovation back in the early cold-war period, when it was charged with producing snacks for the Warsaw Pact armies. Anyway, it was a very pleasing coming-together of fancy and reality.
And if ever you encounter a bag of Seabrook Crisps, I recommend you grab them – they’re quite hard to come by, outside Yorkshire.

Between about 1983 and 2014, I felt like I had a lot of good luck. Generally the coin came up on my side, and the big screw-ups in my life were entirely down to me, and not chance. But I’ve noticed that for the past couple of years the 50-50 calls have nearly all gone the other way. Luck is a very hard thing to measure scientifically, but I thought I’d hit on a possible method. I wear a clean t-shirt every day. It’s not particularly easy to work out the back from the front without looking at the label, and quite often I get it wrong, and then have to take it off and reverse the polarity. So I wondered how often this particular coin-toss would go against me. For the past two weeks I’ve noted down which way round I first donned the shirt. The results are now in. It’s official. It’s scientific. I am now unlucky. I think this goes much of the way to explaining my sub-optimal outcomes on the cricket field, as a member of the Authors XI team. (As with all proper science, I hereby make all my data available, for peer review.)

I was in the queue at Pret the other day, when I managed, for once to perform with grace one of those little pieces of life choreography. It was just a matter of neatly and deftly letting a woman into the queue. It created one of those moments of pleasant near intimacy, accompanied by that Malinowskian phatic communion – inchoate subvocalizations, intended to convey nothing but a desire to communicate. Anyway, we shuffled along after that, not speaking, but bathing in that sense of a life-task well performed. And these little things should not be underestimated, as the obverse – moments of the ballet when you fall on your arse, your tutu askew, your tights ripped, can cast a pall that lasts weeks.So we reached the head of the queue, and then the woman – neither young nor old, but with rather a lovely face, like an attractive nun in a Hollywood blockbuster of the 1950s – half turned and said, ‘Do you mind if I …?” and then reached over and pulled at something that was stuck to my jumper, roughly in the collarbone region. Whatever it was resisted for a moment, and then came away, with a satisfying ‘tock’.I was rather taken aback by this, and I have to confess that my first assumption was that it was a pass of some kind. I waited for the second move, constructing various excuses in my head. She was so nice that I wanted to rebuff her in as kind a way as possible. Even the truth – ‘I’m sorry, but I’m very happily married …’ might have seemed too brusque. ‘What, so I’m so awful you wouldn’t even consider me for a bit of on the side, risk-free hanky-panky…?’ So then I thought I could say that I was gay, otherwise of course I’d love to… Or perhaps that I was mid-transition, and didn’t currently have any adequately performing genitalia of any sort. Or that I was recently widowed, and it was still far too early for me to …But phase 2 never came. The woman bought a banana and a wrap and walked away without another word.Afterwards, what has remained with me is not the misunderstood nature of our intercourse – my assumption that it was a prelude to something more intimate – but the nature of whatever it was she pulled from my jumper. Nothing too gross, I hope, or she would surely not have touched it. A food particle, then. Something that had been moist and then dried, causing the moment of resistance before she pried it loose.And the odd thing is that she didn’t flick it away, at least not in my sight. She still seemed to have it, when she left. Could she be some kind of fetishist? Or was she stalking me, gradually removing small particles of my being until she could reconstruct a full-sized simulacrum? And what would she do then with this inert version of me, made from fluff and food crumbs? One day will she replace the real me with the counterfeit? Would my family notice? Has it happened already?

On my late walk with Monty last night I came across this bunch of blackened bananas placed deliberately, it seemed, on a bench, not far from our apartment. I was weirdly transfixed by the bananas, and found myself speculating on their presence. I imagined a bitter marital argument, about money, I expect, rather than, you know, the other. The children listening, frightened in their rooms, clutching one, her ragdoll, the other, his teddy. Finally, the man, spluttering with inarticulate rage stands, resolving to leave, and never return. Some part of him knows that he must take something for sustenance, and he grabs the bananas – already well past their best (in that, they are like him, and perhaps it is this affinity that makes him reach for them) and leaves, slamming the door behind him. Out in the street, the cold hits him, and with it the sense that he has been ridiculous. He finds the bench and sits there for a while – ten minutes, perhaps, hoping that his wife will begin to feel some pity for him, and regret her stern line on the finances. He decides that he can go back now, thinking to pass the whole thing off as a joke. But he knows to return with the bananas will make him … absurd. So he leaves them there, on the bench. Yes, I’m sure that’s it. I don’t know what happened when he went back in. Other lives are always a mystery. But I think they’ll be OK. Which all left me with the dilemma of what to do with the bananas. They were too far gone to eat, as you can see, even leaving aside the possibility of them having been injected with Anthrax as part of some bizarre and inept terrorist plot (the other possibility I considered). But it seemed untidy and aesthetically unsatisfying to just leave them. Had there been a bin close by I’d have disposed of them there, but there wasn’t, and the likelihood that I would have to wander the streets for hours, with poisonous (or even radioactive) bananas in my hands put me off. So I left them on the bench. I’ll pop out later and see if they’re still there. I suppose if they had been a dirty bomb, I’d have heard about it on the news.

I took Monty out for his walk this morning, in one of my rare good moods. So skipping down the stairs I began to sing ‘Monty dog, where are you going? Monty dog, Monty dog’ to the tune of Bali Ha’i from South Pacific. I strained a little to reach the high notes, but it was OK. Then I heard voices coming towards me from the lobby. Happy children’s voices, and a gently chiding mother. As I could hear them, so they must have been able to hear me. My immediate fear was that it was our next-door neighbours. It’s never good to be caught singing show tunes with made up words about your dog in falsetto in the stairs, or anywhere, really. Then another fear kicked in. Had I been singing in a faintly oriental accent, like Bloody Mary, from the musical? Had I given it a touch of the old Fu Manchus? This was particularly awkward, as our (incredibly nice) neighbour is Chinese. This had the potential to sour the relationship, doubly upsetting, as her little boy (half Italian, in the way of London), is my last surviving superfan. So I crouched in the stairway, praying that they might take the lift, and attribute the racist singing to someone else. But then a door opened further up behind me. Someone else was going to come down, and catch me there, skulking. I was trapped between the two, in a classic thriller scenario, with no hope of escape. I looked down and saw that my grey Swedish army surplus coat was tonally in tune with the carpet. I gathered a baffled Monty into the coat and tried to flatten myself face-down against the floor, hoping they’d go past, thinking I was some sort of bulbous stain, or an unknown sleeping vagrant.
But, you know what? It was all OK. The neighbours took the lift up, and the people behind me waited to take the lift down. So, you see, not all McGowan stories end in failure and humiliation.